What are the best ways to evaluate collaborations for innovation?

Here's a quick guide: 1. Set the Course: Before launch, define what "winning" means. Is it a specific number of ideas, a new product, or ongoing knowledge sharing? Clarity steers metric selection. 2. Metrics Matter: Look beyond outputs like patents. Consider how often you talk, how happy your team is. Choose metrics that reflect your goals. 3. Feedback Loop: Don't wait for the finish line. Regularly use surveys, chats, or focus groups to get input from everyone involved. This fine-tunes your collaboration. 4. Learn and Adapt: Schedule check-ins to analyze data and feedback. Are you on track? What tweaks are needed? Use these insights to continuously improve your collaboration and future innovations

A great way to do it is also by understanding your pain. In my experience, I started in a team where the outstanding was tremendous and, as a new joiner, I only knew that this job had to be done. My result should be having everything on track. For this, I designed the path to get there, starting on knowing who could help me, establishing my networking and delegating what I could. By managing everything I could see the tasks holistically and forecast the problems. With this plan in action, the time to resolve the issues decreased, giving us time to create a tracking for tasks that had +1D or more to be completed and, in the end, all the outstanding was cleared and the tasks are now on track.

Also incorporating a risk assessment component into your objective-setting process. This involves identifying potential risks and uncertainties that could impact the collaboration's success and developing contingency plans to mitigate them. By proactively addressing risks, you can increase the chances of achieving your objectives even in challenging circumstances. For example, utilize a risk assessment matrix to categorize risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. Assign a risk owner responsible for monitoring and managing each identified risk throughout the collaboration. This ensures that risk mitigation strategies are integrated into the collaboration's planning and execution phases.

Evaluating collaboration for innovation? In my experience in enabling innovation, apart from a strategic alignment, 80% of collaboration is information sharing. So the following questions are essential: 1. Who or which team has the required information? 2. Are they willing to share it with our team? 3. Which communication channel/platform can enable this information sharing in real-time, between the stakeholders

Integrate qualitative feedback from stakeholders into your metric selection process. While quantitative metrics provide valuable insights, qualitative feedback can offer nuanced perspectives on the collaboration's effectiveness, relationships, and overall impact. Combining both quantitative and qualitative metrics provides a comprehensive understanding of collaboration outcomes. Implement regular stakeholder interviews or focus groups to gather qualitative feedback on aspects such as communication effectiveness, relationship dynamics, and perceived value. Use thematic analysis techniques to identify recurring themes and insights from the qualitative data, complementing the quantitative metrics with rich qualitative perspectives.

Relevant metrics for me are the ones that impact directly your path and performance to achieve the result that you expect. If you can measure, qualify and add in the timeline that belongs to your plan, you can consider. Sometimes this can be tricky, just because one metric make sense to be added, doesn’t mean your team will be able to follow. So pay attention to your team and the metrics that you put them to follow. Balance the risk for them to grow and the achievable for them to have results. In a nutshell the metrics are entirely linked to your team.

Few addition: 1. Emphasize the importance of fostering a culture of psychological safety to encourage honest and constructive feedback. 2. Ensure that stakeholders feel comfortable sharing their perspectives, ideas, and concerns without fear of judgment or reprisal. 3. Implement anonymous feedback mechanisms such as suggestion boxes or online surveys to provide stakeholders with a confidential platform to share their feedback. 4. Create opportunities for open discussions and brainstorming sessions where stakeholders can freely express their opinions and contribute to collaborative problem-solving.

Prioritize knowledge sharing and cross-pollination of insights across different collaborations within the organization. Encourage teams to document their learnings, best practices, and challenges in a centralized knowledge repository accessible to all stakeholders. This promotes organizational learning and prevents siloed knowledge. Establish a knowledge management platform where teams can contribute case studies, lessons learned, and innovative practices from their collaborations. Encourage periodic cross-functional knowledge sharing sessions where teams present their experiences and engage in peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange.

Measuring collaboration for innovation involves various methods and tools, such as surveys and interviews to collect quantitative and qualitative data from team members, partners, customers, and stakeholders.

While fostering innovation culture, recognize the importance of a culture of inclusivity and diversity within collaborative teams. Diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise can enrich the innovation process by bringing different viewpoints and approaches to problem-solving. Implement diversity and inclusion initiatives such as unconscious bias training, mentorship programs, and diversity recruitment strategies to cultivate a more inclusive collaborative environment. By fostering diversity, you can unlock creativity, enhance decision-making, and drive innovation within collaborative teams.